I always thought it was funny while studying for my Cisco certification that their operating system was also called IOS. I had no idea there was actual drama behind it!

The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.

I think it’s easier to understand net neutrality as something ISP’s can’t do rather than something they must do, since we’ve never seen them really act on it before. It just means they can’t speed up or slow down your internet based on what websites you’re visiting. Under net neutrality, there can never be a deal with Google to give people faster speeds using Google searches than Bing or DuckDuckGo searches.

No worries. You’re right that it’s absurd that we need to fight so much for our government to protect us from blatant corporate for-profit schemes. There was a time when even the US government at least did us the honor of pretending to not take bribes like this. The Intuit tax return money machine is such an obviously fixable problem. All my 20-something friends in the US know that this problem only exists because of lobbying. It’s disgusting to watch elected representatives become so comfortable with their positions that they feel safe enacting policies that hurt their constituents like this.

For context, the reason I’m hating on Intuit and H&R Block and encouraging people to use FreeTaxUSA is because the first two are the main culprits behind the extensive lobbying that has led to the US government continuing to require people to file their own taxes rather than modernizing and making this process free and easy. My “gushing” is in pursuit of changing the broken system you’re pointing out.

I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I’ve used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I’m also a bit of an urban design nerd and there’s a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.

Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

My brain is powered by memes. Memory? More like memery.

From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it’s actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they’re circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we’re going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren’t available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that’s going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.

I don’t think this is all that dissimilar from how Reddit was though if you were subscribed to two world news subreddits and two technology subreddits. I think the key is picking out the more popular communities and only subscribing to those. Eventually the goal would be for the less popular communities to fizzle out in favor of bigger communities.

All it’s going to take is one scandal for these bullshit bills to cause overwhelming outrage that’ll lead to lost elections. These old fucks are so out of touch with modern tech. It’s a joke that they’re in charge of regulating things like encryption. I can’t wait until a generation of people that grew up with the internet ages into these legislative positions.

That’s a common glitch on Lemmy right now. Subscribing to communities oftentimes gives you that message, but as far as I’m aware they’ll still show up in your feed like normal. I’ve heard if you click subscribe and then let it sit for a while it can resolve itself to show you as fully subscribed, but I haven’t had much luck with that.

Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy’s small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn’t even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don’t know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society’s views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.

Sure, it was there before Trump. It technically can be traced all the way back to Reagan and the Religious Right movement. We saw it pop up its ugly head from time to time. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party movement, and so on. But Trump gave it new life. He redefined the movement into something so much newer and more sinister. To some degree they unshackled themselves from any illusion of actual well-intentioned religion. But most importantly for this conversation, 2016 was the year that they started actually using the internet as a recruitment tool. The alt right went mainstream. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and it’s the year that half the people I knew on social media went rabid conspiracy theory bleeding red Republican. As someone else pointed out, it’s the year that Cambridge Analytica started harvesting data from people on Facebook to use for political campaigning. 2016 was an explosion of what was there before that culminated in the election of Trump. And that’s the year that I really felt the greatest shift in discourse on the internet. The spectacle of 2016 turned everything towards news on social media and away from personal connections.

I think we’re all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000’s era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010’s and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010’s. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.

With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.

Does this mean that Canada is always expanding?

Growing up in Wisconsin, drunk driving was a serious issue. Especially on New Years and the Fourth of July. The joke was that every little town throughout Wisconsin always had a church and a bar. There were so many alcoholics that would spend every day at those bars. It’s a tradition that probably goes back to the idea of public houses and having bars be a central location where your community gathers. Many people take the drinking part of that too far though and so the anti-drunk driving PSAs were necessary.

I mean - boiling is boiling, right? Do you ever really need to measure whether your water is boiling in daily life? I would concede that it’s useful to know more easily when water will freeze when it comes to the weather. It’s really the higher end of the Celsius scale that I’m critical of. Fahrenheit could share Celsius’s 0 and my criticism would be more toothless. Though Fahrenheit’s logic around 0 is that anything below 0 weather-wise is exceedingly rare and momentous in northern climates. I think that makes sense as an argument. Negatives in Celsius are common (at least in North America), but a negative in Fahrenheit is mouth gaping dreadful levels of cold. That’s at least as intuitive to me as having 0 be freezing. Since 0 implies the bottom of the temperature scale.

People round to the nearest degree in the US. But that’s kind of my point. It’s more awkward to throw in fractional temperatures and the fact that you do shows that Celsius isn’t properly expanded enough. In Canada people in my anecdotal experience actually haven’t been rounding to the nearest half degree, just the nearest degree thereby making the scale feel less granular.

Not to knock - everyone invariably likes what they’re used to better. I usually get a lot of pushback from people for this opinion. But that’s my point - I concede that even with my familiarity in miles and pounds that kilometres and kilograms are better systems of measurement. The wonder of the metric system is the simple ratios in multiples of 10. But temperature is a realm where that advantage doesn’t exist. And on an objective level, I think Fahrenheit has a better argument for function.

Having lived in places that used both systems, I have to say - I’m objectively on board with distance and weights in metric, but I’ve been less on board with temperature. The Celcius scale is good for science, but less useful for human measurement than Fahrenheit is. Fahrenheit zooms in closer to the human experience of temperatures (around 0F/-17C to 100F/37C) and so allows for slightly more variation when describing temperature in sets of 10 (that range of 100 digits in Fahrenheit is only 54 digits in Celsius, so it makes Celsius feel roughly half as detailed when talking about it). Anything below 0 in Fahrenheit is unbelievably cold. Anything above 100 is unbelievably hot. Celcius centers on freezing/boiling, which I get, but that’s not terribly useful for daily human purposes; namely weather. The temps from around 40 to 100 in Celsius aren’t useful to humans. It’s all just “really fucking hot”. So I give a big thumbs up to everything metric except for Celcius.